Posted on 04/25/2007 3:52:37 PM PDT by Momaw Nadon
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When the aliens finally invade Earth, you may wish you had listened to Travis Taylor and Bob Boan.
And if the invasion follows the plot of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, they might also be the guys called in at the last minute to save the day.
After all, they have written "An Introduction to Planetary Defense," a primer on how humanity can defend itself if little green men wielding death rays show up at our cosmic doorstep.
And yes, they're serious.
"The probability really is there that aliens exist and are old enough to have technology to enable them to come here," Taylor said in an interview.
Taylor and Boan are hardly basement-dwelling paranoids obsessed with tinfoil hats and Area 51. Taylor holds advanced degrees in astronomy and physics, and is an associate at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. He and Boan have done consulting work for the Defense Department and the U.S. space agency NASA.
But their views have won few audiences outside of science fiction conventions, and their book is published by BrownWalker Press, which specializes in fringe topics and books with titles like "The Science and Lore of the Plant Cell Wall" and "ESP and Psychokinesis."
Taylor acknowledged alien invasion is hardly a mainstream concern but said it is naive to assume -- as scientists like the late Carl Sagan did -- that any beings advanced enough to master star travel will have evolved beyond war.
"It's a wonderful idea that has no basis in reality," Taylor said.
FERMI'S BLUNDER?
Taylor and Boan -- along with co-authors R.C. Anding and T. Conley Powell -- revisit two issues that frequently pop up in the debate about whether homo sapiens is alone in the universe: Drake's Equation and Fermi's Paradox.
The formula drawn up by U.S. astronomer Frank Drake in 1960 tries to estimate how likely contact with an alien civilization is given factors such as the number of habitable planets.
Taylor and Boan plugged in what they felt were conservative estimates, such as that aliens cannot travel faster than 10 percent of the speed of light.
After crunching the numbers, they say it is possible that our Milky Way galaxy harbors thousands of intelligent alien species and that there is a "high probability" that one or two of them visit Earth every century.
But if there are so many aliens out there, why haven't we heard from them already?
That is the question famously posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950 to dismiss speculation by his colleagues that intelligent life should be routine.
Taylor and Boan are convinced Fermi got it wrong. Even if aliens used Godlike technology to jump across thousands of light years in a single day, they would still need millions of years to explore all the star systems in the galaxy.
They simply may not have stumbled across our neck of the woods yet.
MUJAHIDEEN-STYLE RESISTANCE
Taylor and Boan started thinking about how to respond to an aggressive extraterrestrial attack during a 2001 discussion about defending against terrorist attacks.
"One thing that popped into my mind was that the only way Americans would be in an asymmetric war on the other side would be if we were attacked by aliens. Everyone chuckled, but then after a minute the comments started setting in," Taylor said.
"Then we really got to talking about it and we thought, well, you know, we really might need this contingency plan anyway," Taylor said.
Failure to prepare may mean mankind will have to dig in and fight with improvised weapons and hit-and-run tactics, much the same way Islamic extremists have battled the U.S. military in Iraq, Taylor said.
"You'd have to create an insurgency, a mujahideen-type resistance," Taylor said. "The insurgents know how to win this war against us. It also tells us that if we were attacked by aliens, this is our best defense."
How to prepare for alien invasion..............
Claim that it’s a “guest worker program” ???
*
Islamic theocracy would collapse if only we could export liberalism. A Middle Eastern ACLU to fight all traces of Mosque and State.
Lucifer's Hammer, for a discussion of how humans will react to a world-wide catastrophe.
Footfall for a possible scenario of invasion by an unexpected species, and humanity's reaction to it.
Reality and imagination operate in two distinctly different universes. The periodic statment that there must be a few planets suitable for life, meaning, provincially, life like us, is meaningless. We can't even imagine what other forms of life might exist, so like the drunk who lost his car keys, we keep looking under the street light, because the light is better there.
As a final thought, speculation is entertaining, but there are lots of serious and real problems that we need to deal with. Sooner rather than later.
Extra-terrestrial life is waaay down on the list of things I worry about.
Klaatu...
Alien #1 (talking to a gas pump) “Take us to your leader”
Alien #2: “This guy looks mean”
Alien #1: “ Take us to your leader or I will blast you”
Alien #2: “I wouldn’t do that chief”.
Alien #1: “Nope, I’m going to blast him” (he does and the gas pump explodes)
Alien #1: “ Wow, how did you know he was so mean?”
Alien #2: “ Anybody with his sex organ wrapped around his feet twice and stuck in his ear has GOT to be mean”.
....Bob
I have read both.
>>Exploring the galaxies Americans refuse to explore- that’ll do it!;)<<
Damn funny.
Thanks, will check it out.
“It’s a wonderful idea that has no basis in reality,”
Just like their ideas
Am at the college without my copy of the list.
Can you please ping the list. If not, will get to it later tonight.
LUB,
one can romp with a book ?
batterys ?
“Our only hope is that they’re here for the coffee and chocolate, and that we can grow enough to supply both them and us...”
See my tagline. I’m not sharing! ;)
I actually thought of you when I posted that...
Here’s a simple math exercise for you:
Suppose aliens come and want Earth intact but kill off all the troublesome humans. How big a hole would they need for a mass grave big enough to dump every body on Earth into ?
Sounds to me like another example of the incrimental preparations of the world populace by the globalist puppet masters for the world to face von Braun’s predicted war with ET that in 1974 he said was scheduled after the scheduled wars with terrorists and Iraq.
Of course, if it looks like the aliens are going to win, you could always destroy the Earth:
They HAVE been doing so for decades . . . along with too many GOP, too.
Idiot traitorous globalists!
Of course, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the many so called ET races are either mostly or exclusively fallen angels/watchers—part of the 1/3 of the angels who allied with satan when he was kicked out of God’s Heaven.
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